This Lozenge Will Save Your Life
dispatch from the #54 to downtown Portland
Allergy: a damaging response by the body to a substance. Also: a synonym for antipathy, a deep-seated feeling of dislike.
By any measure, the woman with the lozenges is the nicest person on the bus. She sits across the aisle from me, so close I could touch her. But I don’t notice her until she speaks, softly, to the man standing in the aisle between us.
To me, this man is an aggravation, as a lot of men are these days. Just another big, broad-shouldered guy, bumping me in the head with his oversized backpack, unaware of all the space he’s taking up in the world, and not sorry about it.
As I lean away from him and his ungainly backpack, the woman across the aisle looks up at him. Right into his coughing, looming face.
“Would you like a lozenge?” she asks.
“Oh, yes, thanks, so nice of you,” he snuffles.
“No problem,” she says. “It can be rough. I have asthma, so I know.”
Minutes pass and the bus is nearly downtown when the woman volunteers that the lozenge she gave him was “local and organic, so it’s stronger.” This is the kind of cause-and-effect endorsement you hear a lot in Portland even though it doesn’t make sense. But the sneezy guy nods, and another passenger turns around in her seat, seeking details about this wonder drug, this organically-strong local lozenge.
Where do you get them? the female passenger asks.
A guy in Beaverton makes them, says the nicest person. “He’s got a formulary out there; he makes all kinds of things with herbs. It’s called Golden Lotus.”
What’s that?
“Gol-den-Lo-tus.”
“I might try it. I’m allergic to my cats and I’ll try anything.”
The nicest person on the bus nods knowingly. Her voice is low and warm.
“I’m allergic to anything that’s alive,” she says. “And anything derived from anything that’s alive.”
I quickly look up, confident that I’ll see a grin on this woman’s face that tells us she’s exaggerating about the limits of her immune system. Maybe, I feel myself hoping, she means allergic to people. Because it can be sickening, can’t it? Just to exist in this world. So many people — millions of snuffling Backpack Men — taking up space that isn’t theirs.
But the nicest person on the bus isn’t grinning. I shouldn’t be surprised. She already told us she has asthma. When she said, “I’m allergic to anything that’s alive,” she wasn’t talking about Mitch McConnell, or the most recent mass shooter, or even Harvey Weinstein. She certainly wasn’t talking about Backpack Man.
I feel sad for myself, because I want something in common with this nice person, this generous hander-outer of locally-powerful lozenges.
And I’m sad for her, because being physically allergic to anything that’s alive has got to be worse than just feeling that way, towards certain people on days when the news is particularly bad, and another angry white man has gotten away with something, and the people with the most power to make things better….won’t.
It must be worse. But it’s a close call.
The nicest person on the bus turns to face the woman who is allergic to her cat and will try anything. She hands her the wrapper from her lozenge. Take it, she says, her voice low and soothing. Take it so you can remember how to get your own Golden Lotus, your own magical lozenge that is stronger than all the rest.
